


Modern Love and Other Misconceptions

by fmo



Series: Social Media [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-02
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-21 14:37:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1553879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fmo/pseuds/fmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone's eager to tell Bucky about today's new Modern Love column in the New York Times, but Steve is reluctant for some reason.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Modern Love and Other Misconceptions

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [摩登爱情和其他错误认知](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1772275) by [yuki812](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuki812/pseuds/yuki812)



“Let’s go out,” Steve says, shutting his laptop. The July day is hot but not unbearable to someone who grew up without air conditioning, and golden-yellow morning light is filling the bright, airy kitchen.

“What? Where?” Bucky says. He’s taking a picture of Steve’s dirty dishes. Honestly, Steve has given up trying to understand the rationale behind any of the photos Bucky takes, but as long as it keeps Bucky happy, Steve’s happy about it.

“We’ll have a picnic,” Steve says, extemporizing. “In Central Park.”

Bucky gives him a look. “Nobody has picnics except in movies,” he says, putting the dishes in the sink, where he will not wash them (Steve will, before bed that evening). 

“C’mon, it’s Sunday,” Steve says. “Let’s go visit some food trucks or see a movie or—or we could go to the farmers’ market,” he says, in a flash of brilliance. Bucky likes the farmers’ market because a), it’s normal food, and b), he plays at flirting with all of the attractive people selling things, and they flirt back and grin at Steve, by his side, who can’t help how he lights up just watching Bucky smile. And then Bucky sometimes gets free tastes of jam or banana bread.

“But,” Steve says, “you have to leave your phone at home.”

Bucky gives him another look, but ultimately the phone stays at home and he and Steve are wearing their standard incognito baseball caps, sunglasses and, in Steve’s case, jacket (to hide his distinctive, uh, Captain-America-ness in his upper half). So that he can wear a t-shirt and go unnoticed, Bucky also takes his arm off and leaves it at home. Steve thinks, or hopes, this is a good sign, because Bucky only takes the arm off when he feels safe, so every time Bucky goes outside without it feels like a small victory.

They walk, take the subway, walk again and wipe the sweat from their foreheads. Steve gets a cold soda to drink as he goes, although Bucky refuses because he dislikes how everyone’s drinking all the time in the future.

“Eight glasses of water a day, they say,” Steve says, just to needle Bucky.

“All I know is, I never carried a water bottle around with me everywhere and I didn’t shrivel up and die,” Bucky says. 

When they finally get to the farmers’ market, it’s in full swing: families, kids, young people, old people, lots of people.

Steve realizes: “I forgot my bag.”

Bucky laughs at him, because this happens every week, and pulls him toward the stands with the home-baked Danishes he likes. “Hey! I was wondering when you two were gonna show up,” says the young guy with the big beard as he gives another customer her change. “What’s calling to you today?” 

Steve is pondering the apple cake and half-listening to Bucky’s conversation with the baker, Joe, when Joe says to Bucky, “You’re a veteran, right? You read this week’s ‘Modern Love’?”

They _have_ told Joe that they’re veterans (which is not untrue, they didn’t specify the war). “Yeah,” Bucky says, “but what’s Modern Love?”

“Hey, Buck, I think I see some strawberries over there,” Steve says helplessly.

“You know, the _New York Times_.” When Bucky’s still nonplussed, Joe goes on: “It’s a column, every Sunday. They’re weird, you know? The theme is modern love, I guess, but you get a mix of good ones and really weird ones, all just essays about love nowadays. But this week’s was really good.” Then, in slow motion, like a car crash, Joe pulls out a paper edition of the _Times_ , folded to the column, and shows it to Bucky.

“It’s this really old gay veteran just kind of scolding all the jerks who use Modern Love to write about the horrible shit they do to their boyfriends or spouses or whatever,” Joe enthuses."But then he writes about what he thinks love really is and then you will cry."

Bucky’s eyebrows raise. “Thanks, Joe, I’ll look it up.” 

Joe sells Bucky something or other as Steve pretends to wander away slightly; it’s not until they’re walking over to the strawberries that Bucky frowns and says, “What?”

“What?” Steve says.

Bucky tilts his head slightly. “This about that love article?”

Tightly, Steve shrugs. “You want peaches too?”

Bucky buys a lot of peaches, and then they move on to the vegetables and buy a lot of those too. They keep going, taking their time investigating all of the stalls (that’s kind of the point) as the sun rises higher in the sky, managing to burn the tip of Steve’s nose despite his baseball cap.

By the time they’re heading up into the Tower, Bucky’s steps are light and he’s swinging the bag around his wrist. They stop off at Bruce’s floor to drop off the herbs they picked up for him and find Bruce with Pepper poring over what look like mock-ups of some kind of Stark-branded advertisements.

“Yes, I told them, we’re not looking for the military aesthetic, it’s technological but—“ Pepper breaks off and waves at them. “Hi, Steve, Bucky. How’re you doing?”

“It’s a good day,” Bucky says thoughtfully, dumping his bag on the counter, then going through it to find the things that are for Bruce.  “You talking shop on a Sunday?”

Bruce sighs a little exaggeratedly and then says, gently, to show he doesn’t really mean it, “I didn’t know when I was invited to live here that I’d be a free consultant for Tony too. Deal with the devil’s what it is. Hey,” he adds, like he’s had a new idea. “Cap, you read this week’s Modern Love? I know you like the _Times_. This one’s one of the best ever—I think you’d like it.”

Steve considers escape via the windows, but then recalls that Tony made them extra-durable. Probably he can’t even break them.

“You’re the second person to say that today,” Bucky says, setting Bruce’s somewhat-squished small basil plant on the counter. He turns to Steve and pauses. “Steve, you are looking awful guilty for someone I know hasn’t done anything I’d consider wrong. What is it with this column?”

“Oh,” Pepper says, covering her mouth with her hand. When they look at her, she just says, “I just remembered—sorry, I should go.”

Steve makes a face, trying to find the right words. “It’s kind of personal, I guess.”

“Ah,” Bruce says, like he understands too.

“Okay, I need my phone,” Bucky says decisively. He picks the bag up and pulls Steve toward the elevator.

In their own apartment, Bucky sets himself on the sofa, reading the article on his phone as Steve puts their harvest away in the fridge. But, really, even as he’s doing the methodical work of unpacking, Steve imagines the words that Bucky’s reading.

It’s only a few minutes in when Bucky puts his phone down and says, “So some of my tweets were in an article on Buzzfeed and now the article’s gone viral.”

Steve blinks. “Which tweets?”

Bucky runs his hands through his hair (just when Steve had got used to it long, Bucky came back with it short as a concession to the three-digit temperatures earlier in the month). “Some of the views of the city from the balcony, except they think I’m a Stark employee and the pictures are from an office level. And some of the pictures have your arms in them.”

Steve comes over to look at Bucky’s phone, and indeed a lot of the pictures have bits of Steve in them. Almost all of them, really. Never the whole of Steve or enough to be recognizable, but Steve’s arms visible around Bucky’s waist, or part of Steve’s shoulder as Bucky takes a picture with his chin on Steve’s shoulder, or Steve’s feet at the bottom of the bed. From the little piece of the article Steve can see, they’re describing the pictures as “beautiful bird’s eye city views plus muscular veterans cuddling plus food porn.” The word “cute” seems to be used a lot. 

“Oh my god,” Steve says, putting the phone face-down on the coffee table as though to avert its gaze.

“Also," Bucky says, "you wrote a column about love for the most famous paper in America, didn't you.” 

"I used a pseudonym," Steve says plaintively. "Really, it's that obvious?"

"Yes," Bucky says. Then he adds, "To people who know you. Also, there aren't that many 96-year-old LGBT World War 2 veterans, Steve, come on." 

Finally, Steve finds that the words come to him. “I always read Modern Love, and half of them are sweet, but the other half are just awful people, being selfish or writing a whole column about why they don’t feel bad for cheating on the person they’re married to. I just don’t think it’s that complicated,” Steve says. “People nowadays are always talking about what they think is old-fashioned. Sure, when we were kids people used to fall out of love, get divorced, cheat on each other, wear drag, date other guys or other women. None of that’s modern, and it’s not modern to be conflicted or think love is hard. It’s the same things as always, just happening on the internet rather than in a bar or in a text message rather than a letter. And it’s not modern to cheat on someone or hurt them, it’s just wrong.”

“You said that in the column,” Bucky says.

“I know,” Steve says, still shaking off the embarrassment of Bucky reading something he wrote.  He thinks he can tell what Bucky's thinking. "I didn't say anything about you because it's private and I didn't ask you if I could."

At that, something in Bucky's expression eases and he says, "Thank you. What you wrote, it was—I can see why everyone likes it."

Steve looks at Bucky, Bucky in his t-shirt and jeans and sneakers and thinks again that it is a miracle for Bucky to be here, sitting next to him, alive and young and smiling and with the roots of his hair damp from the July heat. Perhaps it’s wrong to call it a miracle because of the price Bucky paid to be here, but Bucky told him once, back when things were harder, that all the same it was worth it. “It’s _not_ always easy," Steve says. "But everything that we have right now, we worked for. I don’t mean the apartment, I mean what we have. And I’m proud of that."

“Yeah, me too,” Bucky says. And the way he says it makes Steve think of all those photographs that Bucky takes, not just of Steve but of everything about Steve and him and everything they do together, even boring things like eating breakfast. All those photos, and it makes his chest a little tight to think about it.

“I really,” Steve says—

“Me too,” Bucky says. 

And if anyone criticizes them for not saying it, well, there's a lot of ways to say it, after all, and as far as Steve is concerned he and Bucky say it more often than most, just not always in words.

**Author's Note:**

> Leave comments please!
> 
> Modern Love is a weekly column in the New York Times (maybe it's been discontinued these days, I'm not sure) where people kind of ramble about something to do with love. Sometimes it's super cute and sometimes it's realllly obnoxious.
> 
> Come say hi to me at fmowrites.tumblr.com, and if you found this fic through a rec, please tell me! I love to hear about being recced.


End file.
